Your television flickers. You're alone, your wife on a week-long visit to friends, so you watch the late news. Tonight is entirely about the Berlin Wall: the Germanies reunite, laughing and weeping Germans chip away at the Wall itself. One has a carpenter's hammer, another a sledge, another a crowbar. The sight pleases you; the…
It was one hundred and seven that June day. The swamp cooler on the roof had lowered the temperature down to the high nineties, and the walls and furniture were damp to the touch. I felt clammy and restless but there was nowhere to go except to the shopping center. My husband had flown to…
The first time Sam ever left her children behind to go away by herself, they were two and five. It was a long time ago. She went to a hot springs resort, where she met a very hairy man. Because the man had been there before, and Sam had not, he offered to take her…
When I crossed the border on foot at Scobey six months after the general amnesty, and two weeks after Dad passed on, no brass bands were playing-but it was a well-known fact that even the actual vets didn't get parades. It was a typical eastern Montana March day-wind that had took a running start at…
When Burns arrived in Kotzebue, they were shooting the dogs. He'd never been to Alaska before and it seemed without compromise. Weather had kept him in Nome for two days where he'd seen a saloon fire. He'd been across the street in a shop buying chocolate and bottled water, and the eerie frozen scene mesmerized…
The Bighorns float above the haze to the west of our ranch like marble palaces in a fairy tale. Until the woman came, we'd never been up in those mountains. My father kept us to work day after day, or else there was school, and, until the woman, he'd said he couldn't leave the ranch…
Monday her car wouldn't start and Anita spent all day renting-a-wreck and driving like crazy to the hospital two hours away, and at five she arrived, and at five her father wasn't dead. (It was the carburetor, she found out later.) At five Anita's father was only dying: a man so pumped with fluid he'd…
The first noises had all been dings, mostly, or thuds, but these new noises were all real rumbles and in the walls. Other numbles had come and gone, but they had been lower down, deeper, beneath her-some midnight demon under the bed that had gone away with warm milk or with tea, a runaway train…
Chapter 19 Two women in the square on market day. One plays a harp, the other, bells. At their feet a sign says, "Deux femmes de 54 ans essayant de gagner leur vie dans la dignité. Bonne journée et merci à vous." At their feet a little basket for money. The albino midget passes offering…
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